Flushers, Mechanics & Disposals

[Stonepillar]

As some of you know, I have been working on slowly reworking a lot of the disposals system, fixing mountains of bugs and modernizing decade-old code. I have been making good progress, but there are certain things I would appreciate thoughts on.

Chutes & Flusher Component Cooldowns 

Flusher Components and Chutes are not consistent in that they both recharge in wildly different ways. Disposal Chutes take around one minute to recharge and require the room they are in to be pressurized in order to recharge. Flusher Components meanwhile don't recharge at all and don't require atmos.

There are problems to the current approach:

• Chutes using atmospherics adds a lot of potentially unnecessary complexity.
  
• No-cooldown flushers lead to plenty of absolutely busted mechanic creations (i.e. permastun traps, loafer machines)
  

The solution to the first problem is to replace the atmospheric-based recharge with anything else, such as electricity-based charge or just a simple timer.
Which leaves the second problem, and this sections question: Should chutes or flushers have their cooldowns changed?

If chutes were changed to instead have no cooldown:

• Chutes are simplified significantly.
  
• Pursuers can quickly follow people escaping through chutes
  

If flushers were changed to have any cooldown:

• Loafer machines & machines reliant on fast flushers break or get slower
  
• Probably angers 1 in 2 mechanics
  

Disposal Pipe Construction

Currently, disposal pipes can be created for free and quickly using the portable disposal pipe manufacturer (DPM). In many cases skilled mechanics build entire pipe-based machines without even using any other tools, save for the occasional mechcomp or weird junction.

The solution devised for this is:

• Remove automatic construction and deconstruction modes from the DPM
  
• Require metal to construct pipes
  
• Only dispense unanchored pipes
  

This slows down the construction of disposal pipe machines to a reasonable pace, and makes it cost materials and welding fuel.
EDIT: After out of forum discussion this was thrown out for something much cooler

Flusher Components

Flusher Components (along with other MechComps) can be a hot button topic. Any feedback, positive or negative, about the Flusher Component is useful for deciding what the actual heck to do with it.


Note that removal of the Flusher component is not on the table for my rework.

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Thanks & Happy discussions. 

[Conchuckter]

I definitely don't like the idea of the DPM dispensing unanchored pipes.

[Stonepillar]

I definitely don't like the idea of the DPM dispensing unanchored pipes.

After talking about it on Discord I now agree. It is no longer on the table

[Ikea]

Making chutes use electricity instead of air seems good but hard no to no cooldown (though transport pipes could go with less cooldown). Using chutes for escaping is in a very good place right now, and having no cooldown would lessen a lot of the reward because its no longer as good as an escape while still keeping the high risk.